Employees keener on e-learning than HR

HR professionals are less keen than staff on e-learning claims a survey, unveiled today at the 2009 HRD training and learning event at London Docklands’ Excel centre.

The poll of 2,355 employees and 485 HR directors and training managers in the UK, France, Germany and Spain found 50% wanted more e-learning, a sentiment shared by 40% of HR and training staff surveyed.

Employees were also keener on online information exchanges such as blogs, wikis and forums than HR and training professionals, with 44% of the former wanting more of them compared to 32% of the latter.

Forty-two per cent of HR staff polled wanted to see more classroom-based learning compared to 38% of employees surveyed.

The poll was carried out by e-learning provider Cegos. Its UK managing director, Francis Marshall, said: “There is clearly a gap between what the training function is planning and what users actually want. Today’s learners seem to be more willing to embrace new ways of learning than HR and training practitioners.”

E-Learning provision is more popular in the UK than in the other countries surveyed. The research found 47% of UK staff polled use e-learning compared to a European average of 40%. Just 24% of employees surveyed in France said they had access to e-learning.

Those polled were also asked how e-learning could be made more effective. Some 88% rated work-based scenarios as the best way to achieve this, while 82% – they had more than one choice – plumped for the provision of more self-assessment tools and techniques. And 73% said help from a tutor or peer would be of benefit.

Respondents were also asked how training budgets were being affected by the economic slump. In the UK, a third of those surveyed said they thought their employers’ training budgets would rise during the next 12 months, while 54% said they expect budgets to remain the same, and 13% said they expected them to be cut. In France, 26% of respondents said they expected training budgets to fall, 46% said they would be static, and 27% expected them to rise.

Overall, 95% of employees polled said they were “very” or “quite” satisfied with the training they have received from their employers.

The research was undertaken by Cegos in March. Some 2,355 employees and 584 HR and training professionals were polled by phone, of which 24.8% of the former and 25.4% of the latter were from the UK.